“Spiritual hunger is common to all; but tastes differ.
 There are different forms of God to suit all tastes.”
Swami Yogaswarupananda, of the Divine Life Society,
 a Vedanta-based foundation in Rishikesh,

Gita's Analysis of Anger

Gyan Rajhans P. Eng. 
BHAJANAWALI RADIO PROGRAM

In my opinion anger cannot be analyzed better than what the Lord had done in the above verse of the Gita. Let me explain.

Loss of Reasoning

When we lose our temper, we lose our reasoning too and when we lose our reasoning, we become animals. We all have learnt from our sad experience that when our temper flies, we never do a thing that we will be proud of and often we end up apologizing. However, apology does not help curb our anger. In fact by saying that you are sorry all you have done is you have justified your deeds done in anger. In other words you have found an excuse to be angry again.

Anatomy of Anger

The Gita tells us to first recognize how anger works. Anger is always associated with the frustration of not being able to fulfill your desire like greed, sexual desire, financial desire, hunger for power and prestige. When you cannot get what you want, your mind gets disturbed and anger ensues, which takes your mind away. Consequently your sanity is affected. The beginning of anger could be the most trivial but in no time it reaches to its greatest height totally destroying your discriminating power. You do not care whom you are hurting or harming. If you are unable to harm those you wish to harm then you start harming or hurting yourself. That is what the Lord meant by saying that the end result of anger is own annihilation. Anger is totally unbiased towards age, race, colour, creed and religion – no person is exempt from it. It rouses even those who are by nature gentle and quit to commit savage and violent acts.

Control of Anger

Now that you have understood how powerful and ruinous anger is, I am giving you three clues for avoiding anger and its ugly consequences:

1. Remember anger is not always bad as long as you have not lost your discriminating power. How do you recognize that? By not becoming stubborn about fulfilling your desires.

2. Every evening set aside 10 minutes before going to sleep and lay before minds all the consequences connected with anger and judge their real values. Remember you cannot afford to become angry without losing something. Anger brings grief to a father, divorce to a husband or wife; failure to an employee, loss to a businessman and the list goes on.

3. Read the 62nd and 63rd verses of Chapter 2 of the Gita everyday in the morning and pray to the Lord to really understand the true meaning of what He wished to convey to us through these verse. Your prayer will definitely be answered one day. When that happens; you may still get angry occasionally but you will not be stubborn.

May the Lord be your shining guide.

Previous Column:

The Karma Doctrine

The Power of Mantra Chanting  

Pride Ego and Arrogance: How to keep them at bay?

Jealousy: an unnecessary evil

Why and how to pray?

Ten Commandments for Peace of Mind

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Spiritual thoughts from Taoism - Sandhya Pathania

Demystifying the Sovereign Secret of the Soul - SK Vasudeva 

Hinduism – A Brief Sketch - Swami Vivekananda Part I  II  III